Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

Dusan Makavejev is probably not a name that most people will recognize, but film buffs should. In the late '60s he was part of a wave of Yugoslav filmmakers who changed the face of that country's cinema (much like Mike Nichols in the US) in what got called the Black Wave. Since lots of people in the US only learned of Yugoslavia from the horrors of the 1990s war in Bosnia, it might surprise them that the country had a thriving film industry for a long time.

Anyway, Makavejev's "Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P. T. T." ("Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator" in English) tells of a romance between a switchboard operator and a sanitation inspector. I figure that the movie must've been hard to make, given some of the explicit scenes. But more important is the point that the movie makes about relationships, and it doesn't hold back.

Like "Carnal Knowledge" and "Portnoy's Complaint", this movie shows that relationships are bound to come with complications. I recommend it to everyone.

The combination of almost documentary approach with non-linear storytelling makes Love Affair arguably Makavejev's finest work.

The documentary approach, including a lot of archive footage, echoes Innocence Unprotected (Nevinost bez zaštite) as we follow common people during what turned out to be socialism's heyday in former Yugoslavia.

Non-linear storytelling has later been driven to the excess in WR: Mysteries of Organism (WR: Misterije organizma) rendering Love Affair much more accessible.

This must have been an extraordinary movie at the time, along with rather brave Eva Ras in one of the lead roles.

"It's still unclear who will rule the Earth in 100 years: people or rats." - hmm, are the rats already ruling?

Wonderfully offbeat, this is like a Yugoslavian version of a French new wave film, directed by Dusan Makavejev and starring the fantastic Eva Ras. It shows how subversively naughty it's going to be from the beginning, with a sexologist talking about the ancients worshipping giant phalluses, with cuts to lewd classical images. The story is simple, but how it's told is anything but. It has a switchboard operator (Ras) taking a rat catcher (Slobodan Aligrudic) as a lover, an affair which ends in tragedy.

Throughout the story we get various lectures, including a criminologist talking about modern CSI advances, wonderment expressed over a hen's egg, and a description of notable rat infestations in history, which finishes with a poem to them scrolling up the screen. We also get a window into some of the humbler aspects of life in Yugoslavia at the time, including the woman's apartment where she makes coffee using an iron and the couple sit down to watch a "good" television show, which turns out to be a communist parade with marchers advocating the closing of churches, then looters destroying one. His garret makes her place look like a palace, but they're happy together - in one scene she makes a delectable looking strudel from scratch, stretching the dough out to a thin sheet, and in another, he gets a contractor in to install a water heater for her so she can take a hot shower.

As the story is told in an interleaved way, with a flash forward to her on a gurney in preparation for a postmortem, we know it's going to end badly, and the film gradually fills in how. Along the way we get lots of references to sex which seem like an assurance that it's natural and healthy, including most obviously Eva Ras showing off her beautiful body, and a return of the sexologist to describe a painting that could be thought of as pornographic by Dorde Andrejevic-Kun. Even the door to door wool thrasher is on the make, asking a middle-aged lady "Want me to thrash you too?" to which she replies, "Oh, I was thrashed long ago, my friend." It's therefore ironic that underneath all of its flair, the film could also be seen as a morality tale, as the Hungarian woman who can't go without sex for too long gets pregnant and then killed.

The film seems wonderfully realistic, shot in the streets of Belgrade with real people sometimes staring directly into the camera, and including footage down a wonderfully dank city well. At the same time, it's very playful, alternating between things like the woman blowing big soap bubbles into being on her hands before breaking the 4th wall, a 360 degree revolution shot around Adam and Eve being reenacted by a couple, and soaring communist era patriotic music.

The main thing I didn't like was that the postman who is incredibly aggressive and annoying with his sexual advances eventually gets his way, the old "no means yes if you persist long enough" crap. I considered lowering my review score a bit because of it, but the truth is that I was delighted at how creative this was, especially coming out of Yugoslavia in 1967. I will definitely be checking out more of Makavejev's work.

Film for me is a matter of apprehension, of temporal experience of who you are relative to what is playing before you. So I don't care about a historicist or cinematic scholarly approach to films, in that film (and history) by itself is nothing, a carved artifact. This is my way of saying that there are probably several reasons to find this interesting, as token of 60s Yugoslav mores and 60s New Wave, admire the technique, which is wonderful in its freedom and placing. But for me, none of that matters when it doesn't enliven me.

A sexologist opens the film by humorously explaining the hidden omnipresence of sex in all we do, establishing the essence of the film as something to be secretly whispered and discovered.

The film follows a relationship between a rat exterminator and a blonde switchboard operator around Belgrade, the ups and downs. Salad days, captured with deliberate languidness. Eventually, there is betrayal and tragedy.

The point seems to be, contrasted levels of apprehension: everyday life in the affair in its dullness, small joy and unpredictability, with the system that frames that life as story, attempting to explain: 'experts' lecture on various topics, polemic footage of revolution play in ironic celebration, histories are recounted in voice-over. But you'll note, for instance, that the sexologist makes up nearly everything he says: Rembrandt did not paint sex, Mesopotamian priests did not sit ontop of a phallic column for days. The same fabrication then extends in the footage of joyous communist parades, a similarly subversive ploy is found in the silent Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks.

But it's a weird, incongruent alignment of cycles that fails and fails to build for an hour. One hour felt like two. A big reason seems to be that this sort of bare observation was fresh at the time, but overly familiar now so all the vitality has been zapped out.

It just wastes what could have been a tremendously powerful last scene, where so much of what we see could be toyed with as different levels of involved understanding: a murder has been set up early in the film, but we don't know it's going to feature in the story, the different levels are that suddenly we are aware of what's coming (the murder), unexpectedly what we find out (that it was an accident), and what were the human emotional dynamics (regret and despair, not hate). Imagine the richness..

This is not only a great little movie, but also a great time-capsule of late-'60s Yugoslavia (a nation since destroyed by way of violent imperialist intervention).

A young Hungarian woman and an older, Serbian man enter into a relationship under the internationalist, multi-ethnic, mid-twentieth century culture of communist Yugoslavia. This work contains scenes of beautiful, deeply moving, intimacy and sexuality.

The contradictions of this culture are made plain within the movie by reference to scenes from a Russian revolutionary film by Dziga Vertoz: Committed communist masses dismantle an old Cathedral- their cause is clearly popular and democratic, yet it is intolerant of an institution that has itself embodied intolerance for millennia. "Revolutionary", "scientific" humanity remains constellated within a dialectic of resentment.

Ultimately, human frailty destroys both the Hungarian and the Serbian. Misunderstanding and jealousy cause the lovers to turn on, and destroy, each other within the the terms set forth by this "revolutionary" society. Progress creates the illusion of enlightenment. But ultimately it is human nature that decides our fate.

This outlook ultimately qualifies writer-director Dusan Makavejev as a philosophical reactionary, albeit an exceptionally creative one.